Cheap TaxCut 2003 Premium (Mac) (Software) (Macintosh) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of TaxCut 2003 Premium (Mac)

Using TaxCut for the first time was a decent experience. The program itself is easy to use and negotiate. Jumping back and forth in the return was a fairly simple process. The downside, most of the FAQ pages seemed to go nowhere.

I was able to quickly import my tax info from the previous year's TurboTax files without any problem. The user interface is easily understandable. Overall, TaxCut seems to be a step or two behind TurboTax. But the end results are the same, a tax refund which more than pays for the program. And those steps behind are small steps.

TaxCut or TurboTax?
I've used TurboTax (and before that, MacinTax) to do my taxes on my Mac since 1999. There has always been some reason why I wanted to use TT instead of TaxCut -- a Quicken rebate, non-availability of the retail boxed TaxCut, fear of the unknown, whatever. Well, this year, I decided to save myself some money and try TaxCut, and I have no real complaints about it. In fact, I think it offers a much better value than TT. (I'm running OS X 10.2 Jaguar.)

As you probably already know, it imported my tax data from last year's TT data file just fine. After that, everything went very smoothly. I have many Schedule A deductions, stock options and other Schedule D items, so although my return is not super-simple, it probably lands on the easy end of the spectrum.

I'm not real picky when it comes to the user interface -- I think TT and TC are probably on equal footing there. TC does make it a bit easier to switch back and forth between federal and state returns. I also prefer TC's method of getting directly to the tax forms themselves, although a strange limitation in TC is that you can only have one form open on the screen at one time. An easy workaround for this is to print preview any forms that you want to see simultaneously.

I couldn't see how to download/import my W-2 info from within TaxCut. I did this last year with TT, and it worked great. The documentation gives vague instructions implying that you should be able to do this. Not really a big deal, I just entered the info manually.

Another minor gripe is that the help documentation opens in IE instead of my preferred browser, Safari. I'm not sure what happens if you don't have IE installed on your system!

TT 2002 had problems with printing and perpetually wanting to update itself, so neither program is perfect. But considering the price, I'll definitely be using TC again next year!

A few footnotes:
1) In case anyone is going to buy TT because they can get a Quicken rebate with it, I would try examining alternatives to Quicken. There are much better (and cheaper) programs out there. I have been using an app called Budget (from Snowmint Creative Solutions) for over a year, and it works *much* better for me than Quicken ever did. Gnucash is also supposed to be very good, and it's free.
2) Ignore the review below titled "Pretty much dummy proof." As evidenced by the references to MS Money etc., he's referring to the Windoze version of TC.
3) As others have noted, the spyware in TT 2002 never was part of the Mac program. Just wanted to state the facts correctly.

First year with TaxCut - various quirks/bugs
This year I tried Taxcut on the Mac instead of Turbotax on a PC
(which I've been doing for 4+ years). Taxcut was only so-so.
Printing to pdf's (a feature built into Mac OS X) isn't that great with about 2 duplicating lines between page breaks (2 lines at the bottom of one page duplicate onto the top of the next page; and the page break isn't that clean). Turbotax (last year) on the PC had an option to print to pdf's (which I do for archival and burn to a CDROM; don't generally print the 50+ pages of my return) and that was always perfect. Everything was formatted perfectly, and with "bookmarks" (no bookmarks in Taxcut, but that's probably because it doesn't print to pdf's directly). Turbotax also included printing all the final electronic filing status pages with DCNs, etc. Taxcut doesn't have any of that. Also I had various problems entering lots (12-30 stocks) sometimes getting duplicate entries (workaround, delete everything from the first duplicate to the end and reenter). I reported these problems but HR Block just said they don't support doing pdf's and didn't offer much on the capital gain entries (poor print formatting is a nuisance, but messing up the capital gain listing is a major problem and can be time consuming to double-check everything). I'll probably try Turbotax on the Mac next year (not sure I want to buy Taxcut next year to see if they've fixed any of these things and put up with more nuisances and major glitches). I prepare at least 3 returns each year with these products and am truly disappointed with Taxcut 2003 "Premium" for Mac.